5 Personal-Sport Technologies to Help You Get Stronger, Faster and Better

The statistical revolution is changing the way pro sports are played and watched, but it's also changing what we know about athletes. By measuring g-forces, breathing patterns, adrenaline and plenty more aspects of athletes and their equipment, these sports technologies go far beyond the old 40-yard dash in measuring a player's prowess. And they're not just for professional athletes: Weekend warriors can now receive performance feedback to help them train smarter and get stronger. All you need is a smartphone and plenty of willpower.

Under Armour E39

Under Armour E39

At the NFL's yearly cattle call called the Combine, scouts poke, prod and measure the country's top college football players before the draft. Prospects go through a battery of tests that include a 40-yard dash, shuttle run, standing long jump and vertical leap. This year, Under Armour's E39 augmented the scouts' stopwatches and measuring tapes by tracking players' heart and breathing rates and acceleration.

The E39 is a shirt with heart- and breathing-rate sensors built in, which connect to what Under Armour calls a "bug." The bug is a modular unit that plugs into the front of the shirt to process data from the sensors along with a triaxial accelerometer. Measuring acceleration along vertical, lateral and sagittal planes (the sagittal divides your body into left and right parts, cutting right down the middle of the nose), the bug measures g-forces and can detect imbalances between right and left sides of the body.

Just as body-fat percentage gives a better picture of health than weight alone, the ability to quantify g-forces during acceleration and monitor aerobic recovery provides a more comprehensive athletic analysis than simply clocking a player's 40-yard-dash time. Kevin Haley, Under Armour's vice president of innovation, says that with the E39, scouts at the Combine could quantify not only how fast a player runs, but how quickly they recover aerobically and how much power they generate.

Consider 2011 Heisman Trophy winner and overall No. 1 NFL draft pick, Auburn University quarterback Cam Newton. At the Combine he ran a 4.59-second 40-yard dash—far from the best time. But the six foot four, 248-pound QB generated an eye-popping 9.48 g's when he accelerated out of the blocks. To put that in perspective, many of the top players at the Combine logged about 6 g's of force in the 40. That power is an important trait for coaches and athletes to know, track and build upon, because it has on-field implications. "When you see other QBs hit by a SEC linebacker, they go backward, but when Cam hits one of them, the linebacker goes backward," Haley says.

Under Armour teamed with Zephyr to develop the technology because the company had a track record of developing reliable biofeedback gear. "The U.S. Special Forces uses them, so we know their tech works," Haley says. The E39 bug can connect wirelessly via Bluetooth to smartphones, Macs and PCs to log, analyze and share data. The bug also removes from the shirt and can plug into other shirts or link to a computer or charger. Haley says Under Armour is still working on an accurate ground speed measure for the E39 technology, because GPS didn't provide sufficiently accurate readings when used inside. For now the company is letting some college teams like Auburn and Maryland use E39 during training for this year's football season and getting more feedback from athletes and trainers before they make the product available to the public in the second half of 2012.

iBike Dash+Power

iBike Dash+Power

Cycling has a long history of attaching computers to bikes to monitor a rider's performance. The original editions from three decades ago merely clocked speed, which is a crude measurement of effort from the rider, but better than no info at all. The next innovation measured heart rate, trying to get closer to understanding a cyclist's exertion. Twenty years ago, riders began to receive a more precise measurement of their overall effort from computers that measured power in watts. Still, for the average rider, fitting a bike with sensors was an expensive proposition. But now Velocomp has taken advantage of the ubiquity of digital devices to offer a more affordable option—its iBike Dash+Power, a computer that mounts to a bike and uses an iPhone or iPod Touch as a display.

The iBike Dash shows riders their cadence, distance, time, map and weather, and can display workout stats like bikes at the gym do. You can upload all that information to a Mac or PC, and use iBike's free software to chart and analyze the ride.

To create an inexpensive way to measure a rider's power output, Velocomp looked to Newton's third law of motion, according to CEO John Hamann. "The conventional measurement of force and power is to put strain gauges on the rear wheel, pedal or cranks," he says. "Those cost thousands of dollars, and they work very well, but they all work on the theory of applied force." So instead of creating a sensor that measured applied force, Velocomp created one that measured the forces opposing the cyclist, because Newton's law asserts that the applied and opposing will be equal (equal and opposite reactions.). For iBike, Velocomp combined a wind port, accelerometers to measure hill slope and bike acceleration, and a processor to compile those forces. "We just have a small computer head and we're using sensors that are produced by the tens of millions and put into Nintendo Wiis and automotive applications," Hamann says. "So we have very high quality with very low cost."

Combine that data with the iPhone's user-friendly interface, Hamann says, and you've got useful data riders can relate to immediately. "If I can tell how hard I am working then I can learn how to train my body better," Hamann says. "And I'll learn how to manage my body better so I don't overdo it, but also so I don't leave effort on the table."